Often during the construction, rebuilding or maintenance of railroads, it is necessary to remove ballast or other material from beneath railroad ties. This task of removing ballast becomes more difficult in locations where two or more tracks meet and railroad switches are used. At such locations the ties themselves may be extra long and the steel rails run at odd angles with respect to the ties and other rails. Because of the great variety of track layouts encountered, it is difficult to develop an undercutting apparatus having the necessary flexibility in its manoeuvres to permit the apparatus to remove the ballast from beneath and between the ties no matter what layout of tracks and ties exists. Many, if not all, of the known machines for removing ballast do not have this flexibility and are capable of removing the ballast only along an ordinary stretch of railroad track where no switches occur. Often hand tools and manual labour must be resorted to in order to remove the ballast at switch locations and this is time consuming and expensive.
Accordingly it is an object of the present invention to provide an undercutting apparatus mounted on a carrier capable of moving over ordinary ground and having the necessary flexiblity in movement of the ballast removing means to remove ballast from beneath and between railroad ties even where railroad switches are located.
It is another object of the present invention to provide ballast removing means mounted on a carrier capable of moving over ordinary ground and which is mounted in such a manner that it can be pivoted about a number of axes.
If is a further object of the undercutting apparatus of the present invention to provide a carrier capable of moving over ordinary ground with an undercutter capable of digging itself into the railbed adjacent the ties and then being pivoted so that the ballast removal means or undercutter lie in a horizontal plane beneath or beside the ties.